Amish Culture

I really enjoy all the various accents we have in American English – the regional dialects, quirky localisms, unique manners of speaking (this may be because I also apparently have an odd way of speaking 🙂 ). Amish in different communities have different accents and pronunciations when they speak English as well. When you compare English pronunciation in the Lancaster County Amish community with that…

I just got back from a very Christmas-y week in Lancaster County. Christmas is in the air everywhere, even though it was warmish with not a ton of frozen precipitation (except for one morning). Amish families have been doing late-in-the-game shopping for Christmas presents, just like non-Amish people are this week, and some have already been having family get-togethers. While there, I attended two early…

In September I wrote about one person’s expression of disappointment on discovering the Amish using plastic packaging. You can read that post here if you missed it. In that post I looked at a couple of the misconceptions that might lead one to be disappointed in a cultural group’s choice of food packaging. These were the somewhat related ideas that a) Amish are “frozen in…

In the video below I explain two main reasons why Amish restrict their children’s schooling to eight grades. If you’d prefer to read this in post form, you can do that here. Some additional things to know about Amish & schooling: Amish school teachers are usually young women in the community (though some men do teach, perhaps around 10%) Not all Amish attend one-room schoolhouses;…

So a couple of interesting photos from Jim Halverson today, where you can see what looks like Amish women wearing rings. This first is from a recent auction in Clare, Michigan: And here’s another, also from an event at Clare (2020) – the woman in purple: Now, when looking closer, I must admit it occurred to me that the woman with the bags could perhaps…

 This is a little conversation I recorded with my friend, Ben, who belongs to an Amish church in Lancaster County. It’s the second part of the Q&A I did with my friend Ben in Lancaster County in June (here’s the first part, on Amish & auctions). In this recording, we’re in the car on the way over to a horse auction. Ben describes how…

I’d never heard of this one. But it’s apparently taken off in some Amish communities. Spikeball‘s rules are simple. It’s played in two teams of two. I won’t try to explain the game in depth here (this is what I watched to learn the rules). But essentially you have three hits of a ball, back and forth with your teammate a la volleyball. The object…

Albert Miller grew up as the son of an Amish church deacon in Holmes County, Ohio. He left his community at the age of 18, got his GED, attended Kent State University and eventually medical school, before becoming a doctor. He documents his journey in a new book: You Can’t Do That!: The Story of an Amish Deacon’s Son Who Left the Fold and Became…

Last year we noted an exhibition of photographs by Dennis L. Hughes, who captured thousands of images of Amish life. This exhibition, at Elizabethtown College (Lancaster County, PA) has returned, and is currently running until August 4th. If you’d like to view the collection here’s more on how to do that, along with a link to the online exhibition: Amish Life in Focus: The Dennis…